2026 Theses Doctoral

The Means of Abstraction: The Building Arts and Civic Equality in Chile, 1810-1860

Correa Fernández, Pedro

This dissertation examines the reorganization of the building arts in Chile in accordance with the new conception of the State that emerged with Independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The newly established governments embraced forms of republicanism that reshaped the political landscape and gradually dismantled the colonial structures that had previously governed the building trades. The government sought to bring the arts and industries into regimes of accountability commensurate with the mandates of civic equality, precipitating a cascade of social abstractions in the process.

This research reconstructs the work of agrimensores, rough equivalents of surveyors who became the novice agents of this transformation on the ground at a time when there were no certified architects in the country. Agrimensores employed means of abstraction like surveys, tenders, budgets, and plans to design buildings and project a depersonalized state while introducing anonymous social relationships in the arts of building, still dominated by artisans.

Crucially, this research examines the ways these abstractions were negotiated and resisted in the seams connecting and separating the nascent state with the landed elite, merchants, the church, and, most critically, the artisanal world. I argue that for roughly half a century, the abstractions of agrimensores were simply ways of displacing the problem of authority into a different realm. They were anchored less in disenchanted technical expertise than in models of morality that sought to replace withering notions of honor as bases for authority. The fledgling republican virtues that emerged as the new anchors of practical knowledge, however, still drew heavily from the colonial world and the architecture of civic equality in postcolonial Chile remained firmly moored in the artisanal imagination.